1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of telephony and pertains particularly to a system and methods for establishing a telephone session using remotely received commands from a dialing unit.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the field of telephony, more particularly telephone equipment, the mobile or cellular telephone has gained wide acceptance in the market, mainly because of convenience. Most people now own a mobile telephone and subscribe to mobile telephone services in place of or in addition to a landline telephone service subscription. Demographics may vary somewhat regionally, however families often have several mobile units, subscribe to a mobile service while retaining their landline service as well.
The benefits of using a mobile telephone are well known. Some benefits of going mobile include security for family members including children, and having, hopefully, a reliable connection to friends, business associates, and family regardless of location. The mobile telephone is also convenient in that it generally includes an address book or phonebook where numbers can be pre-entered for easy dialing by highlighting an entry in the book and hitting the “dial”, “call”, or “talk” button on the phone, or, in some cases, by speaking a code name or alias.
One lingering problem with many wireless cellular and digital network services is that service is not always available in terms of suitable signal strength in some locations, such as at the edge of and between service cells or sectors. Due to the nature of wireless signal propagation between towers, satellites and relay points, some geographic features on the ground like mountains, tall buildings, tunnels, and low-lying depressions may serve as significant obstacles to obtaining a suitable signal for connecting to services, even when signal strength is generally good in the overall region. Low or no-service areas are often termed dead spots in the art. Moreover, in satellite-assisted digital networks, bad or stormy weather might also play a significant role in inhibiting signal strength in certain service areas, at least temporarily.
Landline services generally are more reliable than mobile services, because they use dedicated landlines to propagate the signal. It has occurred to the inventor that a mobile telephone having an address or phonebook may dial a number, producing thereby a clearly audible Dual Tone Multiple Frequency (DTMF) dial sequence regardless of the level of signal strength that might be available at the time of the call. Also, the process of dialing an address book entry is more convenient than it is in most landline telephone handsets. Many landline telephone handsets have programmable speed dialing options, but the number of entries that can be pre-programmed is generally limited. Unless those speed-dial numbers are visibly associated with a name on a handset insert card, many times the number/name association if forgotten by the user. On the other hand an address book always has a readily visible association between the name and number of an entry.
What is clearly needed are a system and methods for establishing a telephony session by transferring dialing intelligence executed from a mobile dialing unit to a second dialing unit, which actually dials the number based on a received command. This capability would increase the reliability of existing mobile telephone services by virtue of leveraging more reliable units at the time of the call attempt to actually place calls.